An entertainment blog that was started in 2006, ignored from 2009 to 2011 due to work commitments & the advent of social media. Is back on line as of Jan. 22, 2012.

Thursday, August 03, 2006

The wackiness of wikipedia

Comedy central star Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report, during Monday's show, took on the website wikipedia. If you are not aware of this site, this is an encyclopedia type website where users can actually edit entries.During Colbert's segment called "The Word", he praised wikipedia for its "wikiality". Wikiality meaning "the reality that exists if you make something up and enough people agree with you - it becomes reality."During the show, he then logged onto wikipedia, looked up the page for George Washington. He then decided that Washington did not actually have any slaves and edited that into that page. Wikipedia's George Washington page did actually show that a user named Stephen Colbert typed in these changes at 6:35 (ET). The time that he normally tapes his show.He then urged his audience to find an entry on elephants and for everyone to type in that the population of elephants has actually tripled in the last sixth months. Numerous users did actually do this to approximately 20 different entries on elephants before they were all locked down. Wikipedia administrators then blocked user Stephen Colbert from making any further changes to the website.

I don't know who Colbert's agent/public relations team is but they have done a brilliant job. Thanks to his invention of the word "truthiness", his appearance at the 2006 White House Correspondants' Association Dinner and this wikipedia battle. He has become one of the most important fake newsmen on the planet.

Unrelatedly...top 5 mental mistakes that drive me nuts when people play baseball.1. Runners not running on contact when there are two outs.2. Getting doubled off on a fly out because you forgot how many were out.3. Not understanding what is a force play and what is not a force play.4. Being either the first out or the third out running into third base.5. Not running hard to first base after you connect with the ball.